Hand

The hand is the most basic “tool” in Minetest. It’s main uses are collecting items (by clicking on them), breaking the weakest blocks and many other interactions. It has the slowest digging times of all tools and you can collect items while holding an item as well, so using only the hand has no real benefit over using a “real” tool, except that it never wears off.

However, with the hand you can break more blocks than you’d expect:

• Bookshelf
• empty Chest
• empty Locked Chest you own
• Glass
• Obsidian Glass
• Sand
• Desert Sand
• Gravel
• Clay
• Snow Block
• Wooden Planks
• Junglewood Planks
• Tree
• Jungle Tree
• Dirt
• Grass Block
• Wool
• Flowers and basicly all other small plants
• Leaves
• Jungle Leaves

are just some of them. However, the digging speed is very slow.

The “implicit” hand

If you carry an item which is not a tool (for example: a stone), it has the same properties as you’d have with the hand, which means, you can collect items and dig the weakest blocks with the same digging time as with the hand. If you use a tool to break a block for which this tool wasn’t build for, the digging time also equals those of the hand as long as the block is breakable by hand at all. The tool does not wear off from that. For example, if you use a pickaxe to dig out dirt, the pickaxe behaves exactly like the hand.